Saturday, April 6, 2013

(Grand Rapids, MI)- Cruising with Bill and Judy Stellin is always an
adventure. "Don't expect scary sea stories from this dauntless sailing
couple," says Bill Schanen, Editor and columnist at SAILING Magazine.
"I nominate Bill and Judy for the 2013 SAILING Magazine Best Effort to
Promote Sailing as a Wonderful Way of Life Award. Too bad no such award
exists. If it did, I’d FedEx the trophy to their home in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, in a heartbeat.

Bill and Judy, at ages 65 and 64, retired to their J/42 sailboat
JAYWALKER in 2000 and sailed into virtually every nook and cranny of the
Mediterranean Sea during an eight-year cruise book-ended by
trans-Atlantic passages. But that’s not why they should get the award.

They deserve it for being exemplars of the well-led sailing life free of
the often exaggerated drama and inflated challenges that deter many
from long-distance cruising under sail. And they deserve it for the
article Bill wrote for the Wall Street Journal last December that
carried their example far beyond the small world of sailing.

In the newspaper story, Bill tells of an odyssey in which the sailboat
that was their home and means of travel gave the couple not only the
pleasures of sailing on new waters but entree to a potpourri of some of
the world’s most historically and culturally significant places and the
people who inhabit them, all with little fuss.

There was a small setback at the start of the adventure, when Judy broke
her wrist in an encounter with the mainsheet in boisterous weather on
the first leg from Newport, Rhode Island, to Bermuda. But after that
their story is one of smooth sailing, even when the sea wasn’t smooth, a
tale so cheerful Bill even manages to put a positive spin on a root
canal. Done in Italy, the procedure cost one-tenth of the going rate in
the U.S. and “the work was first class.”

But, seriously, isn’t it a demanding challenge for a couple of Social
Security recipients to sail thousands of miles in a big-rigged,
high-performance sloop through the far reaches of ocean and seas and
into ports bristling with navigational and even political hazards?" Read on here in SAILING Magazine's website.